The nine of them rode up the hill in the rig’s boiling wake. Vince’s eyes began to tear and run.

“Fucking truck!” Vince screamed, and Lemmy nodded. Vince’s lungs were tight, and his chest hurt from breathing its exhaust, and it was hard to see. “Get your miserable fat-ass truck out of the way!” Vince hollered.

It was a surprise, catching up to the truck here. They weren’t that far from the diner—twenty miles, no more. LAUGHLIN must’ve pulled over somewhere else for a while—but there was nowhere else. Possibly he’d parked his rig in the shade of a billboard for a siesta. Or threw a tire and needed to stop and put on a new one. Did it matter? It didn’t. Vince wasn’t even sure why it was on his mind, but it nagged.

Just past the next bend in the road, Race leaned his Softail Deuce into the lane for oncoming traffic, lowered his head, and accelerated from thirty to seventy. The bike squatted, then leaped. He cut in front of the truck as soon as he was ahead of it—slipping back into the right-hand lane just as a pale yellow Lexus blew past, going the other way. The driver of the Lexus pounded her horn, but the meep-meep sound of it was almost immediately lost in the overpowering wail of the truck’s air horn.

Vince had spotted the Lexus coming and for a moment had been sure he was about to see his son go head-on into it, Race one second, road meat the next. It took a few moments for his heart to come back down out of his throat.

“Fucking psycho!” Vince yelled at Lemmy.

“You mean the guy in the truck?” Lemmy hollered back, as the blast of the air horn finally died away. “Or Race?”

“Both!”

By the time the truck swung through the next curve, though, LAUGHLIN seemed to have come to his senses or had finally looked in the mirror and noticed the rest of the Tribe roaring along behind him. He put his hand out the window—that sun-darkened and veiny hand, big-knuckled and blunt-fingered—and waved them by.

Immediately Roy and two others swung out and thundered past. The rest went in pairs. It was nothing to pass once the go-to was clear, the truck laboring along at barely thirty. Vince and Lemmy swept out last, passing just before the next switchback. Vince cast a look up toward the driver on their way by but could see nothing except that dark hand hanging out against the door. Five minutes later they’d left the truck so far behind them that they couldn’t hear it anymore.